OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Pure Bayesian Nash equilibrium for Bayesian games with multidimensional vector Types and linear payoffs
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

We study $n$-agent Bayesian Games with $m$-dimensional vector types and linear payoffs, also called Linear Multidimensional Bayesian Games. This class of games is equivalent with $n$-agent, $m$-game Uniform Multigames. We distinguish between games that have a discrete type space and those with a continuous type space. More specifically, we are interested in the existence of pure Bayesian Nash Equilibrium for such games and efficient algorithms to find them. For continuous priors we suggest a methodology to perform Nash Equilibrium search in simple cases. For discrete priors we present algorithms that can handle two actions and two players games efficiently. We introduce the core concept of threshold strategy and, under some mild conditions, we show that these games have at least one pure Bayesian Nash Equilibrium. We illustrate our results with several examples like Double Game Prisoner Dilemna (DGPD), Chicken Game and Sustainable Adoption Decision Problem (SADP).
GASCOM: Graph-based Attentive Semantic Context Modeling for Online Conversation Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Online conversation understanding is an important yet challenging NLP problem which has many useful applications (e.g., hate speech detection). However, online conversations typically unfold over a series of posts and replies to those posts, forming a tree structure within which individual posts may refer to semantic context from higher up the tree. Such semantic cross-referencing makes it difficult to understand a single post by itself; yet considering the entire conversation tree is not only difficult to scale but can also be misleading as a single conversation may have several distinct threads or points, not all of which are relevant to the post being considered. In this paper, we propose a Graph-based Attentive Semantic COntext Modeling (GASCOM) framework for online conversation understanding. Specifically, we design two novel algorithms that utilise both the graph structure of the online conversation as well as the semantic information from individual posts for retrieving relevant context nodes from the whole conversation. We further design a token-level multi-head graph attention mechanism to pay different attentions to different tokens from different selected context utterances for fine-grained conversation context modeling. Using this semantic conversational context, we re-examine two well-studied problems: polarity prediction and hate speech detection. Our proposed framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both tasks, improving macro-F1 scores by 4.5% for polarity prediction and by 5% for hate speech detection. The GASCOM context weights also enhance interpretability.
Unsupervised Sim-to-Real Adaptation of Soft Robot Proprioception using a Dual Cross-modal Autoencoder
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Soft robotics is a modern robotic paradigm for performing dexterous interactions with the surroundings via morphological flexibility. The desire for autonomous operation requires soft robots to be capable of proprioception and makes it necessary to devise a calibration process. These requirements can be greatly benefited by adopting numerical simulation for computational efficiency. However, the gap between the simulated and real domains limits the accurate, generalized application of the approach. Herein, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework as a data-efficient, generalized alignment of these heterogeneous sensor domains. A dual cross-modal autoencoder was designed to match the sensor domains at a feature level without any extensive labeling process, facilitating the computationally efficient transferability to various tasks. As a proof-of-concept, the methodology was adopted to the famous soft robot design, a multigait soft robot, and two fundamental perception tasks for autonomous robot operation, involving high-fidelity shape estimation and collision detection. The resulting perception demonstrates the digital-twinned calibration process in both the simulated and real domains. The proposed design outperforms the existing prevalent benchmarks for both perception tasks. This unsupervised framework envisions a new approach to imparting embodied intelligence to soft robotic systems via blending simulation.
New extremal Type II $\mathbb{Z}_4$-codes of length 64 by the doubling method
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Extremal Type II $\mathbb{Z}_4$-codes are a class of self-dual $\mathbb{Z}_4$-codes with Euclidean weights divisible by eight and the largest possible minimum Euclidean weight for a given length. A small number of such codes is known for lengths greater than or equal to $48.$ The doubling method is a method for constructing Type II $\mathbb{Z}_4$-codes from a given Type II $\mathbb{Z}_4$-code. Based on the doubling method, in this paper we develop a method to construct new extremal Type II $\mathbb{Z}_4$-codes starting from an extremal Type II $\mathbb{Z}_4$-code of type $4^k$ with an extremal residue code and length $48, 56$ or $64$. Using this method, we construct three new extremal Type II $\mathbb{Z}_4$-codes of length $64$ and type $4^{31}2^2$. Extremal Type II $\mathbb{Z}_4$-codes of length $64$ of this type were not known before. Moreover, the residue codes of the constructed extremal $\mathbb{Z}_4$-codes are new best known $[64,31]$ binary codes and the supports of the minimum weight codewords of the residue code and the torsion code of one of these codes form self-orthogonal $1$-designs.
Parallel and Distributed Data Series Processing on Modern and Emerging Hardware
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

This paper summarizes state-of-the-art results on data series processing with the emphasis on parallel and distributed data series indexes that exploit the computational power of modern computing platforms. The paper comprises a summary of the tutorial the author delivered at the 15th International Conference on Management of Digital EcoSystems (MEDES'23).
Structural generalization in COGS: Supertagging is (almost) all you need
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In many Natural Language Processing applications, neural networks have been found to fail to generalize on out-of-distribution examples. In particular, several recent semantic parsing datasets have put forward important limitations of neural networks in cases where compositional generalization is required. In this work, we extend a neural graph-based semantic parsing framework in several ways to alleviate this issue. Notably, we propose: (1) the introduction of a supertagging step with valency constraints, expressed as an integer linear program; (2) a reduction of the graph prediction problem to the maximum matching problem; (3) the design of an incremental early-stopping training strategy to prevent overfitting. Experimentally, our approach significantly improves results on examples that require structural generalization in the COGS dataset, a known challenging benchmark for compositional generalization. Overall, our results confirm that structural constraints are important for generalization in semantic parsing.
Dynamic Quality Metric Oriented Error-bounded Lossy Compression for Scientific Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

With the ever-increasing execution scale of high performance computing (HPC) applications, vast amounts of data are being produced by scientific research every day. Error-bounded lossy compression has been considered a very promising solution to address the big-data issue for scientific applications because it can significantly reduce the data volume with low time cost meanwhile allowing users to control the compression errors with a specified error bound. The existing error-bounded lossy compressors, however, are all developed based on inflexible designs or compression pipelines, which cannot adapt to diverse compression quality requirements/metrics favored by different application users. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic quality metric oriented error-bounded lossy compression framework, namely QoZ. The detailed contribution is three-fold. (1) We design a novel highly-parameterized multi-level interpolation-based data predictor, which can significantly improve the overall compression quality with the same compressed size. (2) We design the error-bounded lossy compression framework QoZ based on the adaptive predictor, which can auto-tune the critical parameters and optimize the compression result according to user-specified quality metrics during online compression. (3) We evaluate QoZ carefully by comparing its compression quality with multiple state-of-the-arts on various real-world scientific application datasets. Experiments show that, compared with the second-best lossy compressor, QoZ can achieve up to 70% compression ratio improvement under the same error bound, up to 150% compression ratio improvement under the same PSNR, or up to 270% compression ratio improvement under the same SSIM.
MMTF-DES: A Fusion of Multimodal Transformer Models for Desire, Emotion, and Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Desire is a set of human aspirations and wishes that comprise verbal and cognitive aspects that drive human feelings and behaviors, distinguishing humans from other animals. Understanding human desire has the potential to be one of the most fascinating and challenging research domains. It is tightly coupled with sentiment analysis and emotion recognition tasks. It is beneficial for increasing human-computer interactions, recognizing human emotional intelligence, understanding interpersonal relationships, and making decisions. However, understanding human desire is challenging and under-explored because ways of eliciting desire might be different among humans. The task gets more difficult due to the diverse cultures, countries, and languages. Prior studies overlooked the use of image-text pairwise feature representation, which is crucial for the task of human desire understanding. In this research, we have proposed a unified multimodal transformer-based framework with image-text pair settings to identify human desire, sentiment, and emotion. The core of our proposed method lies in the encoder module, which is built using two state-of-the-art multimodal transformer models. These models allow us to extract diverse features. To effectively extract visual and contextualized embedding features from social media image and text pairs, we conducted joint fine-tuning of two pre-trained multimodal transformer models: Vision-and-Language Transformer (ViLT) and Vision-and-Augmented-Language Transformer (VAuLT). Subsequently, we use an early fusion strategy on these embedding features to obtain combined diverse feature representations of the image-text pair. This consolidation incorporates diverse information about this task, enabling us to robustly perceive the context and image pair from multiple perspectives.
PromptCBLUE: A Chinese Prompt Tuning Benchmark for the Medical Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Biomedical language understanding benchmarks are the driving forces for artificial intelligence applications with large language model (LLM) back-ends. However, most current benchmarks: (a) are limited to English which makes it challenging to replicate many of the successes in English for other languages, or (b) focus on knowledge probing of LLMs and neglect to evaluate how LLMs apply these knowledge to perform on a wide range of bio-medical tasks, or (c) have become a publicly available corpus and are leaked to LLMs during pre-training. To facilitate the research in medical LLMs, we re-build the Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation (CBLUE) benchmark into a large scale prompt-tuning benchmark, PromptCBLUE. Our benchmark is a suitable test-bed and an online platform for evaluating Chinese LLMs' multi-task capabilities on a wide range bio-medical tasks including medical entity recognition, medical text classification, medical natural language inference, medical dialogue understanding and medical content/dialogue generation. To establish evaluation on these tasks, we have experimented and report the results with the current 9 Chinese LLMs fine-tuned with differtent fine-tuning techniques.
$α$-Fair Contextual Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Contextual bandit algorithms are at the core of many applications, including recommender systems, clinical trials, and optimal portfolio selection. One of the most popular problems studied in the contextual bandit literature is to maximize the sum of the rewards in each round by ensuring a sublinear regret against the best-fixed context-dependent policy. However, in many applications, the cumulative reward is not the right objective - the bandit algorithm must be fair in order to avoid the echo-chamber effect and comply with the regulatory requirements. In this paper, we consider the $α$-Fair Contextual Bandits problem, where the objective is to maximize the global $α$-fair utility function - a non-decreasing concave function of the cumulative rewards in the adversarial setting. The problem is challenging due to the non-separability of the objective across rounds. We design an efficient algorithm that guarantees an approximately sublinear regret in the full-information and bandit feedback settings.
Manifold-Preserving Transformers are Effective for Short-Long Range Encoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-head self-attention-based Transformers have shown promise in different learning tasks. Albeit these models exhibit significant improvement in understanding short-term and long-term contexts from sequences, encoders of Transformers and their variants fail to preserve layer-wise contextual information. Transformers usually project tokens onto sparse manifolds and fail to preserve mathematical equivalence among the token representations. In this work, we propose TransJect, an encoder model that guarantees a theoretical bound for layer-wise distance preservation between a pair of tokens. We propose a simple alternative to dot-product attention to ensure Lipschitz continuity. This allows TransJect to learn injective mappings to transform token representations to different manifolds with similar topology and preserve Euclidean distance between every pair of tokens in subsequent layers. Evaluations across multiple benchmark short- and long-sequence classification tasks show maximum improvements of 6.8% and 5.9%, respectively, over the variants of Transformers. Additionally, TransJect displays 79% better performance than Transformer on the language modeling task. We further highlight the shortcomings of multi-head self-attention from the statistical physics viewpoint. Although multi-head self-attention was incepted to learn different abstraction levels within the networks, our empirical analyses suggest that different attention heads learn randomly and unorderly. In contrast, TransJect adapts a mixture of experts for regularization; these experts are more orderly and balanced and learn different sparse representations from the input sequences. TransJect exhibits very low entropy and can be efficiently scaled to larger depths.
Customising General Large Language Models for Specialised Emotion Recognition Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has gained tremendous attention over the past year. Previous studies have shown the astonishing performance of LLMs not only in other tasks but also in emotion recognition in terms of accuracy, universality, explanation, robustness, few/zero-shot learning, and others. Leveraging the capability of LLMs inevitably becomes an essential solution for emotion recognition. To this end, we further comprehensively investigate how LLMs perform in linguistic emotion recognition if we concentrate on this specific task. Specifically, we exemplify a publicly available and widely used LLM -- Chat General Language Model, and customise it for our target by using two different modal adaptation techniques, i.e., deep prompt tuning and low-rank adaptation. The experimental results obtained on six widely used datasets present that the adapted LLM can easily outperform other state-of-the-art but specialised deep models. This indicates the strong transferability and feasibility of LLMs in the field of emotion recognition.
Multi-stream Cell Segmentation with Low-level Cues for Multi-modality Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Cell segmentation for multi-modal microscopy images remains a challenge due to the complex textures, patterns, and cell shapes in these images. To tackle the problem, we first develop an automatic cell classification pipeline to label the microscopy images based on their low-level image characteristics, and then train a classification model based on the category labels. Afterward, we train a separate segmentation model for each category using the images in the corresponding category. Besides, we further deploy two types of segmentation models to segment cells with roundish and irregular shapes respectively. Moreover, an efficient and powerful backbone model is utilized to enhance the efficiency of our segmentation model. Evaluated on the Tuning Set of NeurIPS 2022 Cell Segmentation Challenge, our method achieves an F1-score of 0.8795 and the running time for all cases is within the time tolerance.
Guidance system for Visually Impaired Persons using Deep Learning and Optical flow
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Visually impaired persons find it difficult to know about their surroundings while walking on a road. Walking sticks used by them can only give them information about the obstacles in the stick's proximity. Moreover, it is mostly effective in static or very slow-paced environments. Hence, this paper introduces a method to guide them in a busy street. To create such a system it is very important to know about the approaching object and its direction of approach. To achieve this objective we created a method in which the image frame received from the video is divided into three parts i.e. center, left, and right to know the direction of approach of the approaching object. Object detection is done using YOLOv3. Lucas Kanade's optical flow estimation method is used for the optical flow estimation and Depth-net is used for depth estimation. Using the depth information, object motion trajectory, and object category information, the model provides necessary information/warning to the person. This model has been tested in the real world to show its effectiveness.
Deep MDP: A Modular Framework for Multi-Object Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a fast and modular framework for Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) based on the Markov descision process (MDP) tracking-by-detection paradigm. It is designed to allow its various functional components to be replaced by custom-designed alternatives to suit a given application. An interactive GUI with integrated object detection, segmentation, MOT and semi-automated labeling is also provided to help make it easier to get started with this framework. Though not breaking new ground in terms of performance, Deep MDP has a large code-base that should be useful for the community to try out new ideas or simply to have an easy-to-use and easy-to-adapt system for any MOT application. Deep MDP is available at https://github.com/abhineet123/deep_mdp.
Exploring Artistic Visualization of Physiological Signals for Mindfulness and Relaxation: A Pilot Study
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Mindfulness and relaxation techniques for mental health are increasingly being explored in the human-computer interaction community. Physiological signals and their visualization have often been exploited together in a form of biofeedback with other intervention methods. Here, we aim to contribute to the body of existing work on biofeedback interfaces for mindfulness, with a particular focus on incorporating artistic effects into physiological signal visualization. With an implemented artistic biofeedback interface, we conduct a pilot study where 10 participants attend stress-induction sessions followed by two biofeedback mindfulness sessions: classic biofeedback and artistic visualization. The result demonstrates that artistic visualization-driven biofeedback significantly improves the effectiveness of biofeedback in helping users feel relaxed in comparison with a classic graphical form of biofeedback. Also, it shows that the artistic effect makes it easy to understand what biofeedback represents. Future work includes exploring how advanced physiological computing methods can improve its efficiency and performance.
A global product of fine-scale urban building height based on spaceborne lidar
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Characterizing urban environments with broad coverages and high precision is more important than ever for achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as half of the world's populations are living in cities. Urban building height as a fundamental 3D urban structural feature has far-reaching applications. However, so far, producing readily available datasets of recent urban building heights with fine spatial resolutions and global coverages remains a challenging task. Here, we provide an up-to-date global product of urban building heights based on a fine grid size of 150 m around 2020 by combining the spaceborne lidar instrument of GEDI and multi-sourced data including remotely sensed images (i.e., Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-1) and topographic data. Our results revealed that the estimated method of building height samples based on the GEDI data was effective with 0.78 of Pearson's r and 3.67 m of RMSE in comparison to the reference data. The mapping product also demonstrated good performance as indicated by its strong correlation with the reference data (i.e., Pearson's r = 0.71, RMSE = 4.60 m). Compared with the currently existing products, our global urban building height map holds the ability to provide a higher spatial resolution (i.e., 150 m) with a great level of inherent details about the spatial heterogeneity and flexibility of updating using the GEDI samples as inputs. This work will boost future urban studies across many fields including climate, environmental, ecological, and social sciences.
Learning Generalizable Manipulation Policies with Object-Centric 3D Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce GROOT, an imitation learning method for learning robust policies with object-centric and 3D priors. GROOT builds policies that generalize beyond their initial training conditions for vision-based manipulation. It constructs object-centric 3D representations that are robust toward background changes and camera views and reason over these representations using a transformer-based policy. Furthermore, we introduce a segmentation correspondence model that allows policies to generalize to new objects at test time. Through comprehensive experiments, we validate the robustness of GROOT policies against perceptual variations in simulated and real-world environments. GROOT's performance excels in generalization over background changes, camera viewpoint shifts, and the presence of new object instances, whereas both state-of-the-art end-to-end learning methods and object proposal-based approaches fall short. We also extensively evaluate GROOT policies on real robots, where we demonstrate the efficacy under very wild changes in setup. More videos and model details can be found in the appendix and the project website: https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/GROOT .